Border Crossing Stories from Thailand to Laos by foot
I reckon there are probably not too many people who travel these days without the benefit of a guidebook but for those of you who do, you may be interested to note that it is not permitted to walk across the Friendship Bridge that marks the no mans land between Laos and Thailand.
Don't ask me why I thought it was a good idea, there was the not wanting to wait a second longer to be in Laos, the wanting to avoid the queue for the thoughtfully provided bus and anyway I reasoned to myself, there will be tuk tuks to ferry people through as in the Good Old Days.
Instead there was this swift flash road that was more like a motorway and nothing like a border post in sight. Before too long I had walked too far to retrace my steps and trudged along under the blazing sun, dripping a river of sweat into the already swollen Mekong.
Eventually I came to the attention of some border security and a guard was dispatched on a motorbike to shepherd me into the Immigration booth. I tried to explain to the official that I had come the "Long Way" but he wasn't inclined to see the joke. Or to give me a ride on his motorbike that putted along beside me.
It's a serious business these days to move from one country to another. First of all most countries now want proof that before you even arrive, you will leave. There are no one way journeys any more. Travel is not seen as a river flowing endlessly from river to the shore of life in a continuous stream but instead as a bad luck boomerang that always must return in exactly the same route by which it departed.
In such a situation, the focus is then on the turnaround of the boomerang and not so much the flight. In the same way that a hooker is paid not so much for the sex but for the fact that she will leave, nothing is intended to ruffle the surface of the service.
Eventually with all my permissions in hand and my body inside an AC van I return to the city I first fell in love with the last time I was in love.
Arriving then there were red dirt roads, a bakery selling real coffee (a rare treat in those travelling days) and a glass fronted clothes shop selling exquisite silks. As I sat in befuddled bewildered delight with a latte in my grateful grip, I watched as an Ex-pat woman came out of the clothes shop, straddled a motor bike and kick started it with her high heels before roaring off down the dusty road. I just went weak at the knees. It seemed like my kind of town. Then it was a frontier, only in the beginning stages of development that the newly built Friendship Bridge had allowed.
In the evening you strolled along the riverbank and sat at friendly tables eating local food and drinking beer Lao with the locals.
Now the riverbank is being tarted up like a Bangkok hooker into the generic face we see presented to us all over the world. Flood protection, too we are told. The development has seen all the food sellers squatting in one corner of the riverbank area while across the road a KFC shop has set up.
The bakeries threaten to do me in, the clothes shops send me into a dizzy dance of desire and there are really only so many café lattes one can scoff in one day.
Further north, the Song River is so close in Vang Vien I can reach out and touch her. She is pregnant with the monsoon and swollenly swift, caramel is her complexion. She reminds me of a snake I saw once in the jungle, rich coppery brown she was and glinting gliding jewelled like across the jungle garden where I lived. She moved liked a goddess and I remember being surprised that she hadn't left diamonds in her wake.
The river glints diamonds on her surface sliding past in the night.
The limestone cave riddled hills are draped with the monsoon mist and the jungle breathes in green, rich and dripping.
A snake drops down from the roof to the balcony.
After the shock of impact he raises his head to look at me. I stand and shoo him into the bushes beneath and beside and all around.
A white butterfly with orange tipped wings dances on the tip of the leaves, renewal.
